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Monthly Archives: May 2004
New Apple Tutorials
Apple has published some interactive tutorials for beginners: Mac OS X Basics, Printing in Mac OS X, Moving to Mac OS X, Fonts in Mac OS X. I can’t tell whether or not the topics are actually requiring such tutorials and they are didactically well done, but judging from the first look these tutorials seem [...]
Posted in Practice Leave a comment
George Olsen offers a toolkit for creating personas
GUUUI.com points me to a helpful document (PDF): George Olsen has developed a persona toolkit, which can help you build detailed profiles of users, their relations to a product (e.g. a website), and the context in which they use a product. The toolkit is pretty extensive, but intended to be based on a pick-and-choose approach.George [...]
Posted in Interaction Leave a comment
Impact of design on stock market performance
GUUUI.com has news on the economic value of design that has been published by the Design Council UK: Evidence for the link between shareholder return and investment in design has been scarce and anecdotal. An analysis of the British stock market has shown that companies that invest effectively in design, have outperformed the rest of [...]
Posted in Design Leave a comment
The end of filesystems
What users will see in the next few years is a replacement of the filesystem storage paradigm with a database storage paradigm. Microsoft is working on it and Apple seems to develop something similar as well. Oracle already stretched their database to accommodate some kind of filesystem like access – which is not aimed at [...]
Posted in Interface Leave a comment
Blogs at universities
Stephan Mosel pointed to a new weblog initiative at the University of Minnesota. This project offers a free weblog to every university member. This now makes three places in US that offer central weblog services to every member: Harvard University: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/projects/blog/ Univeristy of Minnesota: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ Peter Baumgartner asks why german universities do [...]
Posted in Weblog Theory Leave a comment
Information Visualization Companies
Marian Steinbach has collected companies specialized on information visualization: This is a list of some ~30 companies which have a focus on products or services that deal with information visualization. From A like Aaron Marcus + Associates to X like XPLANE.
Posted in Information Design, Interface Leave a comment
On Outliners
Here is a teriffic series of articles about outliner software: NoteTaker and NoteBook—May 2004 Announcing the FORE/1 Outliner—Apr 2004 Legacy Outliners—Mar 2004 Outliner User Interfaces—Feb 2004 Outliner Use Patterns—Dec 2003 Outliner Features—Part 2—Nov 2003 Outliner Features—Part 1—Oct 2003 Outliner History—Sep 2003
Posted in Tools Leave a comment
Frontier: There’s life in the old dog yet
Frontier 9.0.1 beta 2 is released. Seems UserLand has started to work on Frontier and Manila again. That’s good news. I’d like to hear what they have in store for the Frontier application core.
Posted in Tools Leave a comment
Design hypothesis vs. Scientific hypothesis
As a comment to the Rotman Management design issue (pdf) magazine Victor Lombardi quotes Jeanne Liedtka from page 12: The most fundamental difference between the two, they argue, is that design thinking deals primarily with what does not yet exist; while scientists deal with explaining what is. That scientists discover the laws that govern today’s [...]
An MFA is the new MBA?
Beth Mazur on her IDblog: The May issue of Design Research News has a very interesting promo about the Harvard Business School (HBS) declaring the ‘Master of Fine Arts’ (MFA) as the new ‘Master of Business Administration’ (MBA)… essential for a business career. But they point to the online publication [PDF, 19 MByte] of the [...]
Posted in Design Leave a comment
Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP
Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP: Find out how to create XML-RPC, SOAP and REST web services using PHP, the most popular scripting language for web applications. [via Der Schockwellenreiter]
Posted in Programming Leave a comment
Outage tonight
I apologize for an outage of this site. The Zope server crashed. Seems I need to run some kind of watchdog+restart script. Does anybody have a tip about this?
Posted in Contemplation Leave a comment
How inventions change communication
On 1st July I’ll present some thoughts about “Once upon a time… an imaginary retrospective about the history of technology of the next 30 years” at the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt. I think the topic will be fun to talk about. I don’t really have any idea what kind of people will visit that [...]
Posted in Disruptive Leave a comment
BlogWalk 2.0 ahead
I am going to participate in the BlogWalk 2.0 workshop in Nürnberg on 28th May. I think there are about 15-25 people invited. In contrast to the BlogWalk 1.0 event in March this time it appears to be focussed on weblogs in education. There is also a BlogWalk 3.0 event already scheduled for 4th July [...]
Posted in Weblog Theory Leave a comment
Visual Design Elements of Weblogs?
Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright:Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs [DOC] Conclusion: One pattern clearly emerging as a result of this research is that individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the layout of their sites. This confirms one of the predictions / observations leading to this study: that ‘significant’ [...]
Posted in Weblog Theory Leave a comment
Content vs Context – a contradiction?
Peter Baumgartner reminds us about the role of usage context for quality assessment of learning materials: In all the projects funded by the German BMBF we have tried to deliver excellent e-Learning content. As chairman of the “audit commission” I led a group of experts who recommended the ministry a change of gears: Instead to [...]
Posted in Education Leave a comment
More critic on Nielsen
Andrei Herasimchuk wrote an open letter to Jakob Nielsen in response to this Alertbox story: [...] Mr. Nielsen, I respectfully request you stop posting articles like this. You do yourself and the usability field a disservice by speaking in terms that are vague, not backed up with research data, and filled with hyperbole. Further, until [...]
Posted in Interface Leave a comment
Using the 5Es to Understand Users
Whitney Quesenbery has a very memorable explanation about usability: The 5Es are helpful in planning your usability testing, because each suggests specific techniques:
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Spike
Spike is a a cross-platform shared clipboard (OS X, Windows 2K+).
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